Rocks from space hit Earth every day. The larger the rock, though, the less often Earth is struck. Many kilograms of space dust pitter to Earth daily. Larger bits appear initially as a bright meteor. Baseball-sized rocks and ice-balls streak through our atmosphere daily, most evaporating quickly to nothing. Significant threats do exist for rocks […]
Celestial sights of the southern sky shine above a cloudy planet Earth in this gorgeous night sky view. The scene was captured from an airliner’s flight deck at 38,000 feet on a steady westbound ride to Lima, Peru. To produce the sharp airborne astrophotograph, the best of a series of short exposures were selected and […]
Captured here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, ESO 455-10 is one such chaotic planetary nebula, located in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). via NASA https://ift.tt/3auo60j
On January 21, light from the Moon near first quarter illuminated the foreground in this snowy mountain and night scene. Known as The Lions, the striking pair of mountain peaks are north of Vancouver, British Colombia, Canada, North America, planet Earth. Poised above the twin summits, left of Deneb alpha star of the constellation Cygnus, […]
Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk places a wreath at the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial during a ceremony that was part of NASA’s Day of Remembrance. via NASA https://ift.tt/2M3Wrep
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy Messier 66 lies a mere 35 million light-years away. The gorgeous island universe is about 100 thousand light-years across, similar in size to the Milky Way. This reprocessed Hubble Space Telescope close-up view spans a region about 30,000 light-years wide around the galactic core. It shows the galaxy’s disk dramatically inclined […]
Welding Underway on Orion for First Artemis Mission Landing Astronauts on the Moon via NASA https://ift.tt/3aaEK4z
How far do magnetic fields extend up and out of spiral galaxies? For decades astronomers knew only that some spiral galaxies had magnetic fields. However, after NRAO’s Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope (popularized in the movie Contact) was upgraded in 2011, it was unexpectedly discovered that these fields could extend vertically away from the […]
Kepler-22b is the first planet discovered inside the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. via NASA https://ift.tt/2MrNlYs
How did this strange-looking galaxy form? Astronomers turn detectives when trying to figure out the cause of unusual jumbles of stars, gas, and dust like NGC 1316. Inspection indicates that NGC 1316 is an enormous elliptical galaxy that somehow includes dark dust lanes usually found in a spiral galaxy. Detailed images taken by the Hubble […]